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Play backgammon online free, no sign-up

gammonchain lets you play backgammon online for free, straight away: no account, no email, no download. Open the page, pick a match length and play. It runs in any modern browser, on a phone or a laptop.

What you get as a guest

• An identity without an account. On your first visit your browser generates a cryptographic key and a name to go with it. The private half of the key stays in your browser; the server only ever sees the public half. There is no password anywhere.
• A rating. Matches against people count towards a Glicko-2 rating, weighted by match length, with a public leaderboard. (Browsers too old to create the key can still play, unrated.)
• Bots at three levels. Easy plays loose and blunders often, medium looks one move ahead and slips now and then, and hard uses the strongest engine the server has. Bot matches are practice and never rated.
• Real opponents. Find an opponent posts your game to a public list anyone can join, or private link gives you a link to send to one person. There is also two players on one device.
• Proper backgammon. Matches from 1 to 21 points or money play, the doubling cube with Crawford, optional clocks, a daily puzzle and analysis of your finished matches.
• Dice you can check. Every match ends as a signed record your browser verifies for you. See how the dice are provably fair.

One thing to know: a guest identity lives in that browser's storage. Clear your site data and the key, and the rating attached to it, are gone.

What registering adds

If you want to play from more than one device, register with a username and an email address. To sign in anywhere else, you ask for a link by email; it works once and expires after 30 minutes. There is still no password.

The trade is stated plainly in the account panel: to make that work, the server stores your key, so its operator could in principle sign as you. A guest's key never leaves the browser. Details are in the accounts docs.

No ads, no trackers, no cookies

gammonchain sets no cookies and has no advertising, analytics or third-party tracking of any kind. Your settings and your key are kept in your browser's local storage, which is not sent to the server. It is an independent, non-commercial project with nothing for sale. The privacy page lists exactly what is stored.

Start a free backgammon game

No download and no sign-up. The board is one click away.